Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Max JOE BIDEN was pissed. DONALD TRUMP had just won the 2016 election. That was part of it. But Biden now felt even more resentful of how President BARACK OBAMA and members of his inner circle had discouraged him from running that year. Within days, Biden began whispering to senior Democrats that he would have beaten Trump and that HILLARY CLINTON was the wrong candidate for the moment. At one point, Biden ran into DAVID SIMAS, Obama’s director of political affairs, who had insisted to him that Clinton’s low polling numbers on “trust” wouldn’t matter because voters didn’t trust Trump either. He snapped to Simas, “Oh, trust doesn’t matter, huh?” and kept walking. That anecdote is one of many from the new book, “The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama,” by New York Magazine’s GABRIEL DEBENETTI. Rather than the sappy bromance routine on display between the two at the presidential portrait unveiling at the White House this week, the book captures the nuanced friendship, and tensions, between the hyper-ambitious and competitive presidents. It also details how events in 2015 and 2016 forever altered the Obama-Biden relationship. “This was the first time that you saw Obama, more or less explicitly – or at least implicitly – rejecting [Biden’s] politics by backing Hillary Clinton at the time, and [Biden] did take it very personally,” Debenitti told West Wing Playbook in an interview ahead of the book’s release next week. In the fall of 2015, Obama asked his leading senior advisers DAVID PLOUFFE and DAVID AXELROD to meet separately with Biden and tell him he was polling far behind both Clinton and Sen. BERNIE SANDERS in a primary contest and would likely embarrass himself and the president if he ran, Debenetti reports. Biden hemmed and hawed around a decision. But when he ultimately chose not to run, he separated himself from Obama by offering praise and private counsel to Clinton’s opponent, Sanders. After Biden met with the Vermont senator during the primary, he told an aide: “At least he gets it.” Biden “saw [the Sanders campaign] as an opportunity to really test Hillary and to really make sure that her campaign was being pressured, but also a way to make clear that he was independent from Obama,” Debenetti told us. “Obama, at that point, didn't really get the Bernie phenomenon and didn't for quite some time.” It ended up being the low point of the Biden-Obama relationship and a topic that the two still avoid. Even so, Obama’s skepticism of Biden’s presidential aspirations carried through into the 2020 cycle, when many of his aides went to work for other candidates. “Obama had whispered to friends that he strongly doubted Biden could create the kind of inspiring connection with the first-to-vote Iowans and New Hampshirites that Obama once had, and which he would need to seriously compete,” Debenetti writes. Biden, in the end, badly lost both those states only to turn around his candidacy in South Carolina, in part due to Biden’s relationship with Obama. In the book, Debenetti recalls how Biden made a show to whomever was around during the 2020 campaign of reading the latest article about Obama world being interested in other candidates like PETE BUTTIGIEG or BETO O’ROURKE. (According to Debenetti, Obama himself was also skeptical of Buttigieg’s prospects because of both his youth and that he was too short.) Tensions have continued into the Biden presidency, often playing out in the background. Biden and his inner circle have been prickly about the idea that his administration is an Obama restoration or serves as an Obama third term, even though Biden has fed this narrative by hiring many of his former boss’s senior aides. “The idea that he's simply there to clean up the Trump mess, restore the Obama years and move things a little bit forward, goes against the way he thinks about change-making and the way that he thinks about the presidency and his presidency, in the arc of history,” Debenetti told West Wing Playbook. “It's not a lie that he reads Irish poetry and thinks in these grand historic terms.” MESSAGE US — Are you DAVID SIMAS? We want to hear from you and we may publish your response tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.
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